Clueless leaders - Anonymous employee Pax8 Employee Review

The clickbait title of this review would be, 'Get a six figure salary by knowing this ONE guy; no skills or talent necessary!' A lot of higher ups here come from a single connection, and having worked with several of these people, I'm realizing these people got director-level jobs because they had a friend at the company. There isn't a point in complaining to their boss if you find someone is bad at their job, that senior director is that guy's friend too. Instead of leading with market research, business analysis, and having a plan about why they're making stuff, they frequently make big decisions without consulting their engineering teams about feasibility or value. They then don't tell other people at the org about these plans (engineers or designers), make big promises to investors and users, then let the worker bees pick up all the pieces when it comes down to figuring out a way to actually build and achieve a vision. Directors do not have a strategic business plan for the company, or metrics, or even an understanding of their users, but talk to any of them and they'll happily point you to some pictures of features they've told the engineers to build. To them, building a feature is the strategy. When you point out that we don't have the resources or need a longer timeline to make the feature, they say just build this thing, no matter how long it takes, maybe some other team will take care of that. They don't care about working lean and creating incremental value, or coordinating across departments. Everything's shifted into waterfall type projects and a lot of stuff falls through the cracks. Statements you'll hear from your coworkers–on a weekly basis– include: 'The priority changes every week,' 'they don't have any requirements yet but want us to get building,' and from the higher ups, you'll hear 'we don't know yet,' 'that's a good question but I don't have an answer for you.' Pax8 seems to be especially poor in the product and design teams. People outside of engineering usually have a more positive view of the company.